Navigation tips&tricks

When using the PHP.net website, there is even no need to get to
a search box to access the content you would like to see quickly.
You can use short PHP.net URLs to access pages directly.

Note, that these shortcuts are expected to work on all mirror
sites, not just at the main site. If you find that some of these
shortcuts are not working on your mirror site, please report them
as a "PHP.net Website Problem" at
http://bugs.php.net/.

There are currently three types of URLs you can use this way.

Page shortcuts

If you write in a PHP.net URL (e.g. http://fr2.php.net/get-involved,
first this URL is matched against the PHP.net pages. If there is
a page named get-involved.php, then you'll get that page
immediately. This type of shortcut makes easy to type in a link
in an IRC conversation or mailing list message. If the script
finds no page with this name, it tries to find a manual page.

Manual shortcuts

If your URL can't be matched with a page name, a manual page
is searched for your query. This is the case for the
http://fr2.php.net/preg_match URL. The following pages
are searched for in the manual:

This kind of URL will bring up the manual page in
your preferred language. You can
always override this setting by explicitly providing
the language you want to get to. You can embed the language
in the URL before the manual search term.
http://fr2.php.net/hu/sort will bring up
the Hungarian manual page for sort() for example.

Search shortcuts

At last, if there is no PHP page, and there is no manual
page matching your query, a search is issued on the site with
the query you typed into the URL. An example of this kind
of URL is http://fr2.php.net/search_for_this.
The exact behaviour of this search is affected by
your own My PHP.net settings.

Even smarter tricks

We also have shortcut aliases to access some resources more quickly,
and with a nice URL. Aliases are translated to their relevant shortcuts
before the first step (PHP page search) mentioned above. Some examples
of shortcut aliases: http://fr2.php.net/whatisphp,
http://fr2.php.net/php4news. The latter is an external page
alias, as it points to a file on the Git server, containing information
about changes in PHP. There are also some convenient aliases(e.g.
http://fr2.php.net/de/phpversion which displays the German
manual page for the phpversion() function.